I purchased G.R.A.W 2 (Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2) for the Xbox 360 the day it was released. I have played it just about daily since buying it. This time around I decided I would only play ranked multiplayer matches. I never really did on the first version that came out for the 360. When you play ranked it keeps tracks of your wins and losses and your percentage between ranks goes up and down until you get to 100% percent and move up to the next rank.

The problem that I encountered is that two weeks ago I hit rank 5, however my percentage has remained at 0% towards the next level. No matter how many straight wins I get it doesn’t move past 0%. I posted my problem on Ubi’s forums, the maker of the game. I have not received a reply how to get around this problem. I did however get replies from individuals telling me they had the same problem. So I thought this might be more than a glitch I was having. I went to the Xbox Community Forums hosted by Microsoft and found there were more individuals having the same problem. I can only imagine there are a lot more people having the problem but not taking the time to post about it.

To compound the problem are those scared about losing their rank. The latest trend on the ranked matches is to kick anybody off the server that is a lower rank than what the host is. You will see this posted all over the Xbox forums, people ranked 1s are quite upset at being booted off most of the ranked matches they join. I mean everybody starts off as a 1 and in order to rank up you have to play and win. They however are not being given the chance to even play most of the time, so how can they rank up? Microsoft has double edge sword here, do you remove the host’s ability to kick an individual? If they do, then the host doesn’t have the ability to remove someone that is a distribution to the game play of the other players in the match. I leave it to them to figure that one out. This however affects me now as I am being kicked out of matches because players are beyond level 5.

So I decided to take matter into my own hands and make some calls.

The first call was to Ubi Software the maker of the game. The person I got there was very nice and informed me there was nothing they could do to help since I was playing on Microsoft’s Live servers not Ubi’s. So I called over to Microsoft Live support. My first call resulted in me being disconnected when asking for a supervisor, because the individual had no clue of what I was speaking of. My second call I made was answered by a very nice lady that really tried to help me but tried to blame everything but the kitchen sink on my problems.

The first thing she asked me was how I was connected to the Internet. I told her I had a 30mbit cable connection. She asked me if I was directly connected to the Internet or was I using a router. I told her I was behind a firewall but the appropriate ports were being forwarded to the Xbox 360. She said she never heard of my make of firewall and that Microsoft has a list of approved routers. I then informed her that I have an enterprise class firewall and that no $50 Microsoft approved router was going to replace it. I told her that according to the Xbox 360 network diagnostic that NAT was showing as open. In other words my Xbox 360 thinks it is directly connected to the Internet. This is because I have ports 3074 udp/tcp, 2074 udp/tcp and port 88 udp on the firewall being forwarded to the 360. She again wanted to go back to her list of routers, which I had to interrupt her and ask that she move on, the network connection is not the problem since I have being playing online since the 360 was released problem free.

She then moved on to the cache in the system which she had me clear. That did nothing so she moved on to asking me to delete my profile from the console. I told her that would do nothing for me but humored her and deleted my profile. She then had me recover my gamertag on the console which did nothing to fix the problem. I informed her that the rank sits on their servers and I can only see my rank from the leaderboards once I have connected to Xbox Live. She still thought that there might be a problem with my console so she had me create a new profile. While I was doing this she put me on hold. As I was completing the registration of the new profile, she came back and told me she spoke to her supervisor and there is a problem going on that they are trying to determine the origin of. She politely gave me a reference number and asked that I call back once I played a couple of games under the new profile.

I logged in with the new profile and after being kicked from about 10 matches because I was a rank of 1, I found one that I could play on. I played 3 matches and won them all. I went back to the leaderboard and it showed that I was at 65% of my next level. Everything was working as it should, it was not my console or my connection.

I once again called back to Microsoft this time I gave them the reference number and they connected me to the appropriate support person. Upon picking my call the young lady immediately told me there was nothing they could do about my rank being reset. I informed her that was not the reason I called. I went through my story again, this time with the added information with the new profile. Again she said there is nothing she could do. I politely asked for her supervisor, which responded he will tell you the same thing. I said that is fine but I would still like to speak to him.

The supervisor came on and listened to my story and said there is nothing he could do. I asked if this could be escalated to a higher level since I was not the only person experiencing this and pointed him to look at their own forums as evidence of this. He told me he was as high as he gets and this was a developer problem. In other words this was Ubi’s problem. I informed him of how this could be Ubi’s problem since I am playing on Microsoft’s servers and it was Microsoft’s server holding the ranking system. I then went on to telling him I basically have a $60 game I can no longer enjoy playing online because I will be kicked from virtually every game as players rank into the teens and higher. Again the answer was I can’t help you.

I then decided to bite the bullet and start from scratch and rebuild my rank for the ground floor. I then asked him how could I reset my rank back to 1? His reply was I don’t know how to do that. I asked if he could ask someone that did. He was really steadfast in not trying to help and responded that this was a new game and no one knew anything about the game itself. I then asked that the information I added about playing with my profile be added to my reference number in some futile hope someone might still look at it. I thanked the gentleman for being so helpful and understating about my predicament (Sarcasm).

I called back to Ubi, I don’t know why I just did. I Spoke to a lovely lady there and told her of what I just went through. She apologized for me having to go through it. I asked if there was some way of someone there speaking to Microsoft about the matter. She told me that there was nothing they could do concerning Microsoft’s own servers. She laughed and told me They didn’t even inform us when they went ahead and reset everyone’s rankings back to 1, two weeks prior. She did acknowledge that they have been fielding similar calls concerning the ranks being stuck at 0% from others.

I guess Microsoft’s stand on this matter is that we already have your money for the Live service and you have no choice other than using us for playing online so why should we care that your having a problem let alone fix it for you.

I hope enough people read this that it becomes a thorn in Microsoft’s side so that they get off their $^&es and do something to fix it.

Below are some links to similar problems being posted on Microsoft’s forums:

BTW.. I forget to mention, the reason the supervisor said he couldn’t help me is that there is no such problem. During their daily briefing this has never been mentioned. I guess they don’t read their own forums then. Ooops!

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